Number of the Month

December 2007

As often seems to happen, the printed version of the Telegraph
is somewhat more sensational than the internet
version. The former carried the headline

Cooked food is linked to cancer in women

The clue for those in the know is the phrase “linked
to”, which is sub-editors’ code for “Yes, we know it is rubbish, but it
might sell a few extra copies.”

And rubbish it certainly is! For a start it is based on a data
dredge. The Trojan Number is 120,000, but
the number giving rise to the claim is around 200. The exposure to the target
substance, presumably anecdotal and based on a single dietary questionnaire at
the outset, acquires enough precision to enable the sample of 300 cases to be
divided into two classes. We do not know how many diseases and target substances
made up the matrix of connections, but three diseases are mentioned here.
Interestingly, no correlation with breast cancer was found, as has been the case
before, even though the dreaded chips (French fries) have been the object of scares
and, of
course, scams
by Californian lawyers. At least the epidemiologist involved betrayed
some signs of conscience “It is important that these results are corroborated
and confirmed by other studies before far-reaching conclusions can be drawn.”
On this occasion a bit of common sense also emerged from Cancer Research UK: “Women
shouldn't be unduly worried by this news, It's not easy to separate out one
component of the diet from all the others when studying the complex diets of
ordinary people.”

How tasteless to launch this particular scare in Belgian
Frites Week, it’s bad enough to have their nation falling apart, without
their national dish coming under threat from the junk pushers. This one has been
coming up regularly in the pages of Number Watch for over five years, so
it has the look of a hardy perennial.

Old friends

The Telegraph’s
current junkfest also
embraces one of our favourite recurrent items, the
birth month fallacy. Now they are getting really ambitious and are including
all sorts of correlations with different seasons of the year. Naturally, the
opportunity is not lost to include a picture of a celeb. It would not be the
same either without the appearance of the doyen of such investigations, Richard
Wiseman, who provided our first ever Number of the Month
over seven years ago.

The noble sacrifice

But the junkfest to dwarf all other junkfests is taking
place in Bali. Again the Telegraph headlines differ. The print edition tells us

15,000 fly to paradise isle to save the
planet

while the internet
version is more circumspect. The likes of Al and Arnie will, of course, be
travelling by private jet, as the fundamental rules of DAISNAID
dictate. Doesn’t it make you feel good to know that your humble efforts and
the taxes they attract have contributed to this essential work, and that a mere
15,000 people are prepared to make the sacrifice of time and effort on our
behalf? There will always be those who carp at the needs of our superiors for a
certain amount of comfort, but Government spokesmen justify the expense because
ministers will need to hold private meetings at all hours. Odd, though, that
such reasoning does not seem to apply to the rest of us when we put in our
expenses claims. It is perhaps also rather untimely that the global warming
theory has been blown out of the water by recent discoveries of errors and
adjustments that have been uncovered in the measurements
that purport to support it, but worry not, our friends in the media will ensure
that hoi polloi will never get to hear
about it.

God's in His Heaven, All's Right With the World.

03/12/07

Consequences

Apologies for yet another bout of
egocentric hypochondria, but a number of people have asked and this is easier
than replying to all those e-mails.

It has not been a good year.
Flattered to be offered a free flight and accommodation to be guest of honour at
a conference, I broke my self-imposed embargo on flying in September last year.
I cannot claim that I did not know what to expect. Eight years ago I wrote the
following in Sorry, wrong number!

Letit
not be supposed that the EPAare the
only group at it. Before I turn to the subject of smokingon
aeroplanes,let me declare an
interest. I have been twice quite seriously ill with lung infections after long
distance flights, ending up attending hospitaland
having a cocktail of antibiotics and steroids. My GP practice told me that this had become a common
phenomenon. The destination was immaterial. Only the overnight flight was
significant. I consulted friends in the airline industry and learned that since
the introduction of non-smoking flights the airlines had cut back on the
filtering and refreshing of air, thus saving substantial amounts of money. A
senior flight engineer told me that with my susceptibility I should avoid
non-smoking flights. Fat chance! Unless I want to go to Japan.

After all, it was only a hop across
the North Sea to Gothenburg. I might have to pay for it with some coughing and a
bout of antibiotics and steroids, but it seemed worth the risk. One fine
morning, I walked a couple of miles across that city from the hotel to the
conference centre, with only a short beer break. Little did I know that this
would be the last time I would walk more than a hundred yards (and that with a
stick). I was already developing a fever on the return journey and a flat
battery on the first plane meant that I would spend most of the day in airports.
I must have looked ill, because people helped me off the train when I arrived
back in Wiltshire. Subsequently, I had about ten different antibiotics, some of
them by infusion and injection in hospital, all to little avail. Among the
little visitors I have hosted have been coliforms, pseudomonas, moraxella
and H Influenzae. I had some difficulty in persuading the medics that
these episodes were always accompanied by a flare up of arthritis. But this week
I had a session with the surgeon who gave me a new hip fourteen year ago,who
confirmed that such infections are indeed associated with arthritis. He told me
of one patient (as it happens a young airline pilot) who was reduced from
vigorous health to being a cripple in a matter of weeks, due to an infection
with moraxella. It turns out that, among other damage, one knee joint has
deteriorated to the point of needing replacing, if I am to regain any mobility
and freedom from pain, but the question is will my condition allow such a major
operation? That is being considered by the experts.

I was once rather sceptical on the
subject of chronic fatigue, but not any more, and this is the point relevant to
the stuttering performance of Number Watch this year. Unless you have
experienced it, it is difficult to explain how the simplest task (such as
sitting at the keyboard to write this) can seem daunting. Whether it is the
infections or the more than a dozen different pills I now take (or a combination
of the two), the result has been a substantial loss of drive.

The great irony is that my fifteen
minutes of fame occurred right in the middle of it all, when Rush Limbaugh
discovered the warmlist. I have had to turn down a
number of invitations to write pieces or take part in discussions. The backlog
of unanswered e-mails is dispiriting. I have become a reluctant recluse. The
worse part is the sudden influx of book orders. To add to the tragicomedy my
partner in this small enterprise, my wife, has had a couple of bouts of
pneumonia recently. We will give priority to the orders that have been prepaid
through the web site and hope to restart mailing when the seasonal collapse of
the mailing system is over. Grovelling apologies to those who have been waiting!
They must think we are embezzlers. We have to face the possibility that the
trade orders will never be dealt with. It is likely that the books will go out
of print fairly soon, unless we can find a publisher to take them on, just at
the moment of success.

Always look on the bright side of
life. I still hope to be present to report on the annual Numby awards.

14/12/07

Greenflation
– hush!

We coined the term Greenflation back in May
2006 and revisited it at the beginning
of this year. Now global recession is beginning to bite and the threat is
serious, which makes the universal conspiracy of silence even more egregious.
Newspapers and television commentators talk about inflation as though it were a
mystery, when it is merely the outcome of deliberate policy. Green taxes filter
through the economy, but in the end they are always paid by the ordinary punter.
Green prohibitions, such as the prevention of development of new, realistic
energy sources, will also end up being paid for by the masses, some with their
lives (in the inevitable power cuts). Since the
establishment are taking care not to explain it to them, people do not
understand that remote policy decisions, such as building vast arrays of
useless, heavily-subsidised wind turbines, always end up with a raid on their
own pockets and the risk of worse. The subsidies for biofuels have led
inevitably to a substantial rise in food prices, but people are too ill-informed
to see the connection, because they are not being told by the media.

Today we simultaneously have the other negative force of
recession . This was largely caused by governments ignoring the excesses going
on in the banking world. In Britain it partly took the form of failing to
protect the mutual societies and letting the carpet baggers persuade their
short-sighted members to turn them into third rate banks, such as Northern Rock,
thus selling their birthright for a mess of pottage. One of Gordon Brown’s
characteristic changes was to make the bank regulation system so complicated
that in the end it was nobody’s responsibility.

The Bank of England has actually acted outside its Brownian
remit, which is solely to deal with inflation, in joining the world effort to
solve the “liquidity crisis” by reducing interest rates, while the spectre
of inflation haunts it in the background. But this inflation is no accident. It
has been deliberately engineered by Green politicians and bureaucrats in
undemocratic organisations like the EU and the UN. Only in the last week we have
heard calls in Bali for a wholly meaningless world carbon tax, while Brown crept
shamefully into the ceremonial chamber, when all but he had left, to sign away
Britain’s last vestiges of control over its own destiny, making its parliament
even more of an irrelevant superfluity than it was before.

Economic collapse is the sole end and purpose of Green
policy. They are determined to drag the rest of us kicking and screaming into
the new Stone Age and, thanks to their media cronies, we are letting them do it.

Footnote:
The likes of the BBC and the UN have been obliged
to notice the rise in food prices and guess what: it is due to climate
change. They even have to acknowledge the contribution of biofuels, but these,
of course, have nothing to do with government regulations and subsidies; they
are caused by the rise in oil prices. Clever of all those farmers to anticipate
the movement of international prices at seed sowing time! And, of course, the
oil price has nothing to do with the Greenies suppressing home grown energy
supplies and forcing reliance on the unstable parts of the world.

17/12/07

The
seventh annual Numby Awards

The names of the glamour spots of the world have a magic of
their own, Acapulco, Bali, Monte-Carlo etc., and so it is with the Balls Pond
Road. As Christopher Robin said about his favourite stair, there is no other
place quite like it. The riotous colours of the plastic raincoats and umbrellas
lent it an even more heightened allure, as once again the animated throng
converged on the legendary Assembly Rooms above the Take Away Kebab.

The Chairperson of the awards committee was Lord Delpus,
the Labour billionaire peer who built a used car empire from nothing after he
left Eton. He is best known for leading the campaign to replace the statue on
the column in Trafalgar Square with one of Tony Blair. He had hoped to spring a
surprise by introducing his spiritual leader as guest of honour, but a problem
arose over the absence of a suitable landing strip for the Reverend Gore’s
private jet. Negotiations to build one in Highbury Fields or Clissold Park broke
down owing to local opposition. Apparently people did not understand how the
carbon and tree loss would be offset by the purchase of trees for planting in
Bolivia by one of Mr Gore’s companies. His Lordship reluctantly abandoned the
project but called for ministers to make changes in the national compulsory
school curriculum so that such ignorance would become a thing of the past.

In introducing the ceremony, the Chair said that it in
Britain it had been the year without a summer, as the climate models had
accurately forecast. He went on to pay tribute to the wonderful economic
performance of the Government, which would ensure a prosperous new year for
everybody.

The awards were handed out by Lady Effluvia Coldbottom,
Deputy Chair of the National Spoon and Fork Regulatory Authority. She
enthusiastically endorsed the sentiments from the chair. As tradition requires,
the recipients were not actually present to receive the awards, but were
represented by proxies appointed by the committee. It is therefore gratifying
that proxies have now become an important component of post-modern science.

First on the agenda was a new award, funded by the Zen
Buddhist Temple of Neasden, which was for Koan of the Year. The committee was
unanimous that it should go to Richard
Black of the BBC for a radical koan that had provoked a great deal of
meditation, namely What do sceptics really
believe? As is often done the trophy carried an etched inscription, this
time a quotation from Thomas Henry Huxley:

The improver of natural
knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him,
scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

A special award for corporate creativity goes to the
Liberal Democratic Party, who by dint of the application
of meta-mathematics managed to turn an 11% decrease into a quadrupling,
hence proving the occurrence of global warming.

A giant step forward in New Labour’s campaign to realise
the Orwellian dream was the first provision for the formation
of a secret police to spy on ordinary citizens going about their business.
That this should find its basis in an imaginative crusade of political
correctness only goes to heighten the significance and is a pointer to the
future. The Orwell Memorial Trophy therefore goes to British parliamentarians
who resisted the temptation to think for themselves. The engraved quotation on
the trophy was

The award for Nuisance
of the Year was close fought between several candidates. There was Martin
Durkin, whose film The Great Global
Warming Swindle revealed a shocking irreverence for The Consensus that in
another age would have resulted in burning at the stake for heresy. Similarly,
newcomer Sandy
Szwarc with her Junkfood Science
Blog spread a dangerous lack of alarm about food scares and, in particular, the
anti-obesity campaign. Christopher Booker and Richard North attempted to
undermine the very basis of modern government with their book Scared
to Death. The award, however, went to Kristen
Byrnes. As her ladyship remarked when handing out the award, this marks a
dangerous failure of the US education system. When young people start thinking
for themselves, where will it end? Gore forfend that such a phenomenon should
occur in Britain.

The award for Neologism
of the Year goes to the wife of Graham Dawson for this
addition to the dictionary:

Her ladyship pointed out that this disease, though
widespread, is caused by purely imaginary fears, as it is well known that
England (thanks to Numby Laureate Patricia Hewitt) has the best out-of-hours
service in the world. A lout at the back, who called out “What about Penny
Campbell?” was quickly escorted from the premises by the ushers.

There is no doubt that the political event of the year was
the imposition of the smoking
ban in Britain. The award for Dogged
Determination goes to ASH. They refused to be deflected by such
irrelevancies as reason, tolerance, science or fact, but drove towards their
goal, inventing and increasing numbers of unnamed corpses as they went. Their
opponents, foolishly relying on rational argument, completely misjudged the
state of the isolated hothouse that is the House of Commons. They have thus
created a wonderful precedent for others who would suppress that inconvenient
abstraction of human freedom.

The principle award for Phenomenon
of the Year went to James
Hansen. There has been nothing like him since the Old Testament went to
press. Further comment would be to gild the lily.

A small group within the extensive organisation had been
lobbying for an award to the Number Watch
Poet in Residence, Walter de la Plage.Now
that the subject of his
masterpiece has reached the highest office in the land it seemed appropriate
to some. However, on investigation it transpired that all is not well chez
Walter. He was already very upset to be overlooked for the post of Poet
Laureate, but when the present holder of that post came out with a work of such
transcendental and haunting genius as A
song for Jonny, he realised that he could never reach such heights of poesy,
lost all motivation and went into a decline. He was last seen sleeping on the
Victoria Embankment clutching a bottle of rough cider.

The ceremony could not close without a further tribute to
Tony Blair and his legacy. The meeting stood in silence to meditate on that glorious
legacy with particular reverence for the ultimate
legacy.

Number of the month 15,000

This is the modest number of politicians, bureaucrats and
retained scientists who endured
the privations of an expedition to Bali, in order to save the planet, of
which we ordinary people are so neglectful. We should all acknowledge our sins
of omission and promise to purchase an appropriate number of carbon offsets from
one of Mr Gore’s companies in repentance.

Number of the Year - 7

This was the Number of the Month for June and is the number
of new laws generated by the Blair Government every day. They were almost all poorly drafted and at best
irrelevant to the hopes and aspirations of a benighted populace. At worst they
were affirmations of the Orwellian nightmare as the future of Britain. The Blair
Government created over 100 new crimes and over 1,000 new misdemeanours, yet
there is murder and mayhem on the streets and the people live in fear for their
lives and property. The police are notable by the absence (except in an outbreak
of political incorrectness). So, particularly to those Australians who have
ignored this example and have evidently tired of stability and prosperity by
installing a Labour Government, thereby cutting off another line of retreat for
Britons, here is a quotation to end the year: